Teldrassil Realms tournament Dispute

At Teldrassil we had a little less than 50 players show up and things were great the first 3 rounds. Then core went off and things went smoothly there. Once Core constructed picked back up is where the dispute is.

1. Players were playing people that they had already played during draft.
2. Players were playing people that they had already played in constructed.

The first one is understandable as draft and constructed are kind of two seperate entities. The 2nd is inexcusable. It made Teldrassil into a BG with a larger prize at the end. The TO and judge told me that they discussed it and that I was to play on (I had encountered both problems). This caused me to go from potential top 8 to 12th with loses from a person I had played earlier and beaten in constructed. If CZE did not foresee this and did not include the proper guidelines then a poor job was done changing the way the tournament was done. If guidelines were set in place and the TO and judge did not take the proper care in insuring that procedures were correct then shame on those people that failed to do a proper job in running what most consider to be the 2nd largest prized tournament for CZE

As was explained to you at the event, because of the size of the initial tournament field, mid-tournament draft pods and series of drops, it was nearly inevitable that players would see duplicate opponents because of how the CZE Tournament Tracker pairs for Swiss format pairing.

There was no other way to remedy this situation, short of making unreasonable pairings heading into rounds 7-9 where people would get paired down to play opponents with 2-3 fewer wins.

Any other competitive level event you've been to probably had 70+ people remaining after drops.

After combing through tournament documents this morning, there's nothing I could find that guarantees anyone that they're not going to play duplicate opponents.

Swiss format is pretty specific - where possible, everyone is going to be paired against someone with the same number of wins. In the event of an odd number, that person will play someone with one less win.

Swiss format, however, starts to get shaky when you tinker with the event - the pods of draft in the middle of the event create an uneven distribution after those three rounds. Further, a 42 person event fits cleanly into a 6 round event, which is the normal number of rounds per tournament policy. Realm Champs is a minimum 9 rounds, with the aforementioned pairing-disruptive draft in the middle.

This was much of the attempted explanation on Saturday. You're welcome to protest to and through Cryptozoic, though through public forum isn't likely to garner their attention. I recommend submitting a ticket through http://cryptozoic.kayako.com/, where your complaint will receive specific attention.

As was explained to you at the event, because of the size of the initial tournament field, mid-tournament draft pods and series of drops, it was nearly inevitable that players would see duplicate opponents because of how the CZE Tournament Tracker pairs for Swiss format pairing.

There was no other way to remedy this situation, short of making unreasonable pairings heading into rounds 7-9 where people would get paired down to play opponents with 2-3 fewer wins.

This is correct and accurate.

Originally Posted by cervidal

Any other competitive level event you've been to probably had 70+ people remaining after drops.

This is also correct.

It can be a pain, but there isn't a way to fix it other than manually pairing down further (which seems even more unreasonable). That is an issue with Swiss and the amount of people at the tournament with a high number of rounds. There is bound to be some duplicate pairing. Other than manually checking to see who the players have played against, making sure there isn't an alternative (sometimes there is but usually there isn't) there isn't any real fix.

This wasn't a failure on the Tournament Organizer's behalf. It was a failure on CZE for creating a tournament format that was flawed to begin with. If they had started the tournament with 3 rounds of draft and then moved on to constructed, it would have been fine. It would be possible for players to pair up in Draft and Constructed but not a 3rd time. (Or twice in Constructed)

Doing this might have simplified the whole tournament as I know it took the TO awhile to arrange the draft pods because the software wanted to assign multiple pods of 7.

This wasn't a failure on the Tournament Organizer's behalf. It was a failure on CZE for creating a tournament format that was flawed to begin with. If they had started the tournament with 3 rounds of draft and then moved on to constructed, it would have been fine. It would be possible for players to pair up in Draft and Constructed but not a 3rd time. (Or twice in Constructed)

Doing this might have simplified the whole tournament as I know it took the TO awhile to arrange the draft pods because the software wanted to assign multiple pods of 7.

While I like this idea. I'd gather many other people would be against it.

The biggest reason I would not go for that format would be for latecomers. Any player who arrives after the draft has started is screwed. If the rounds are constructed, they could at least be given a first round loss.